Money from the Ford government’s Skills Development Fund is benefiting the owner of a new Toronto nightclub where strippers give lap dances and scantily clad aerialists hang in the air by their teeth.
FYE Ultraclub opened in September in the Horticulture Building at Exhibition Place, a public historic site that entrepreneur Zlatko Starkovski has had an exclusive lease to for over 20 years. It promotes itself as a burlesque-themed nightclub.
Starkovski — “Z” to his friends and staff — has reimagined the space many times over the years, but it was most famously known as Muzik, when, a decade ago, then-mayor Rob Ford’s appearances at the nightclub grabbed headlines.
Two of Starkovski’s hospitality companies that operate out of the Horticulture Building are the official “training” and “employer” partners of a non-profit organization that has received about $10 million in taxpayer funds from the provincial government’s Skills Development Fund (SDF), internal Ministry of Labour documents show.
Since 2022, the Social Equality and Inclusion Centre (SEI) has received the funds to train Starkovski’s current and future employees at the Horticulture Building, and subsidize some of their training shifts at Starkovski’s events there, the documents show.
In the most recent round of SDF grants, the SEI was awarded $2.5-million to continue its program — the Hospitality & Events Advanced and Continuing Education (HEACE) initiative — into the 2025-26 fiscal year.
Both Starkovski and the head of the SEI said that FYE Ultraclub is not part of the publicly funded training program, and taxpayers didn’t pay to train the club’s performers.
On its website and social media accounts, FYE Ultraclub says it offers “a high end, sophisticated burlesque experience” inspired by those “made famous in Miami and Ibiza.”
However, as a Trillium reporter recently learned by visiting the club, the experience offered there has a lot in common with a strip club. Bartenders and bottle girls wore red corsets, high-cut black thong-like bottoms and fishnets, while performers in far less danced on stages, or performed acrobatic or aerial acts between bars, hoops, or while suspended from above by their teeth or hair.
Strippers circulated and performed lap dances, including in the area beneath the building’s historic dome. Access to private rooms was offered, too, at a fee of $400.
In a statement, Starkovski denied employing or hosting “strippers.”
”FYE Ultraclub features burlesque performers, aerialists, musicians, and world-class DJs — professionals who are part of a curated artistic program designed to deliver a premium entertainment experience,” Starkovski wrote in an email. “We do not employ or host ‘strippers,’ and we consider that term inaccurate and derogatory when referring to performance artists who specialize in burlesque and theatrical dance.”
Two well-placed sources said that some women who work in the private rooms at FYE also work as strippers at other clubs.
The general manager of the Brass Rail, a longtime strip club on Yonge Street in Toronto, told The Trillium that he was aware that some strippers from his club have been working at FYE Ultraclub, but said there’s no formal arrangement between the two clubs.
“It’s not with our permission,” said the strip club manager, Bill Greer.
According to licensing data from the City of Toronto, “Grand Bizarre/FYE Ultraclub” at the Horticulture Building was issued an “adult entertainment club” licence on Feb. 24, 2025. The seven other businesses holding the same licences from the City of Toronto are all strip clubs.
Two women who’ve worked at FYE Ultraclub and spoke with The Trillium described being surprised by the uniforms they were given just days before it opened.
One of the women said the red corset and black “bikini-thong” bottom, fishnets and high heels didn’t match how the club had originally been described to her: “a high-end kind of spot, very discreet.” While she paid for the uniform, completed a training session involving a walk-through of the club in the outfit, and then worked in the club when it opened, not everyone did, she said.
Both women said some of their fellow trainees left after seeing what they were expected to wear.
“They did not want to work at a place like that,” one of them said.
While she and the other female recruits knew the club had a burlesque theme, the strippers and private rooms came as a surprise, she added.
“The tone and the vibe of this club was not at all what was sold to us when we got hired,” she said.
She was granted anonymity out of concern over retaliation for speaking with the media.
SEI’s official partner companies are Grand Bizarre and the Toronto Event Centre. Starkovski said FYE Ultraclub operates separately from them. He is the sole director and beneficial owner of all three companies, which are all registered at the Horticulture Building, corporate records show.
One source in this story showed The Trillium payment records from Grand Bizarre Inc. for shifts she said she worked at Toronto Event Centre events and at FYE Ultraclub.
Asked about this, Starkovski wrote in an email that “FYE Ultraclub uses the Grand Bizarre centralized payroll system and company, in order to avoid costly duplication.”
“As of the inception of the new FYE Ultraclub, no employees have been trained under the SDF program,” he added. “Therefore, the new FYE Ultraclub is not a beneficiary in any form of the Skills Development Fund. It is false to suggest otherwise.”
“No SDF funding has been used for any purpose related to FYE Ultraclub,” Starkovski said.
The SEI’s Skills Development Fund-supported training “has not been involved in the new FYE Ultraclub pilot entertainment project in any training and financial capacity,” the non-profit’s CEO Jenny Andonov said in a statement.
“Also, no Skills Development Fund resources are used or have been used to train or compensate any burlesque dancers, aerialists, or any performers involved in the new FYE Ultraclub project,” she said.
In responding to questions from The Trillium, a spokesperson for Labour Minister David Piccini wrote, “Any suggestion that SDF funding has been used for anything other than delivering training for workers to obtain employment in in-demand sectors is unequivocally false.”
“To be clear, SDF funding cannot be and was never used for the purposes you are implying, and the claims underpinning your questions are a complete distortion of reality,” Michel Figueredo, director of communications to Piccini, wrote in a statement.
“Every SDF recipient must comply with strict reporting, auditing, and results-tracking requirements to receive funding. These are set out clearly in each recipient’s transfer payment agreements (TPAs) with the ministry. Every project receives onsite monitoring visits, and the ministry conducts spot audits with recipients required to submit monthly reporting showing process towards meeting their (key performance indicators),” Figueredo’s statement continued.
“The ministry also has clear processes in place to investigate, recoup funds, void contracts, and take swift action when these strict requirements are not followed.”
Fundraisers and a wedding
The sprawling Horticulture Building is not only a nightclub — Starkovski’s businesses also allow it to be booked for private events, and have for years.
The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party hosted a few fundraisers there in early 2022, around the time the office of then-labour minister Monte McNaughton awarded the SEI the first of the four grants it has received from the Skills Development Fund, records show.
The Ministry of Labour accepted applications for funding from the second round of the SDF from Sept. 29, 2021, until Feb. 7, 2022. McNaughton’s office set a deadline of several weeks later, at the end of March 2022, for the ministry to sign its funding agreements with second-round recipients by, emails The Trillium obtained using the freedom-of-information system show.
The provincial government’s spending disclosures for the 2021-22 fiscal year show that some of the second round of SDF was paid to recipients, including the SEI, before April 2022. The Ministry of Labour reported paying $251,998 to the numbered not-for-profit corporation that the SEI operates as, 12490625 Canada Institute, by the end of March 2022.
The PC Party said in its financial filings for 2022 that it paid $31,947.36 in “fundraising expenses” to Grand Bizarre Inc. during that calendar year. It held one political fundraiser there on March 3, 2022, according to a couple of PC-connected sources, photos from the event, and information included in the party’s filings to Elections Ontario.
As information in its financial filings illustrates, the PC Party made a major fundraising push in early 2022, leading up to the provincial election that spring. At least some of the other PC fundraisers that the party paid Grand Bizarre for were in March or April 2022, according to information from sources and its financial filings.
These fundraisers helped the PC Party raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions, which are largely used to bankroll its election campaigns.
From 2022-23 to 2024-25, 12490625 Canada Institute, the SEI’s numbered not-for-profit, was given almost $10 million in taxpayer funds by the Ministry of Labour.
In June 2023, the PCs’ campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, celebrated his wedding at the Horticulture Building, via Starkovski’s Toronto Event Centre business.
Teneycke has long been a trusted informal adviser of Ford’s and runs lobbying firm Rubicon Strategy. Rubicon has registered to lobby for about a dozen different companies and other groups, including Grand Bizarre and the SEI, that have benefited from the Skills Development Fund.
Teneycke did not respond to questions asked to him in an email about his wedding before this story’s publication.
Starkovski’s been a Ford Nation figure for years.
In 2013, when Rob Ford was mayor and now-Premier Doug Ford was a city councillor, Starkovski supplied the alcohol for two of their Ford Fest parties — large outdoor barbecues where Ford Nation supporters can eat free food.
After Doug Ford became premier in 2018, his government set out to revitalize Ontario Place, provincially owned waterfront land connected to Exhibition Place.
In 2023, the Ford government announced it was “actively discussing partnership opportunities with Ontario Live to provide family-friendly, world-class social, hospitality, and entertainment services” at Ontario Place. The Globe and Mail reported soon after that Starkovski was part of the Ontario Live partnership, along with the PC-aligned construction union LiUNA.
Premier Ford initially said that Ontario Live would design restaurants and bars at Ontario Place, but his government changed course, and the minister in charge said the province would find a vendor through a competitive procurement process instead.
—With files from Jack Hauen and Aidan Chamandy